Episode 35: Having The Right Perspective as a Freelancing Dad with Austin Church
Chad:
Today we’re joining brand strategist Austin Church. In his freelance business, he helps companies to figure out their branding so that they can connect more with their audience.
He is a freelancing dad, and he has a lot to share today on navigating some of the challenges of freelancing including how to get started as a freelancing parent and what pressures you deal with as a freelancing dad,
He also provides some really good insight in the perspective that you need to have when you are pursuing a freelance career as a dad, as a provider, and as a parent that will save you a lot of stress as you go through this journey.
Austin also coaches freelancers, and you can find information and resources that he has over at www.FreelanceCake.com.
Let’s get into it.
Austin, please share a little bit about what you do as a freelancing dad. Have you always been doing this? Give us an overview of your journey to where you are today with the business or of businesses that you are running.
Austin:
What I currently do is brand strategy and coaching for freelance creatives, and I've always done it. I started in April, 2009. We had our first kiddo in March, 2013. My kids have only ever known a freelance dad and there's not a whole lot that I would change.
I like the flexibility of being able to go on field trips and plan life how I want it to be with my kids.
For example, today is a snow day here in Knoxville, Tennessee, and we just kind of rolled with the punches. There were no major logistical challenges because of the snow. That flexibility is a big reason why I've chosen to stay freelance all these years.
Chad:
That's great. How did you get started with it? Did you have any other job you were managing at the same time or you were just like, “I'm just gonna go all into this and see how long it takes to build it up.”
Austin:
Freelancing has always paid the bills for me.
I got a job at an ad agency in October 2008, and then finished grad school in May 2009. Then in April 2009, I got laid off.
So I've only worked for someone else for about six months, my entire career. To answer your question though, I've done a bunch of other stuff. I've always had side hustles and passion projects. There was a four year stint, 2013 to 2017 where I was working on a tech startup that I co-founded and invested in, but I was still freelancing.
Freelancing was still what paid the bills, the startup didn't pay me anything.
So freelancing has been that continuous thread for almost 13 years now. Gosh, that makes me feel old. Kind of crazy.
Chad:
Very cool! So what have been some of the biggest challenges with this?
In my situation, right after college, I took a full-time job as a video editor and then I quit or got fired from that job because the company was downsizing. It was a really small business.
I tried freelancing and gave up on it nine months in. I actually went back to that same full-time job with the same employer. Eventually that employer became my first client when I was able to negotiate a freelancing contract with them.
Then I went from there to find other clients but the first two or three years were very difficult. I'd gotten into masses of debt trying to create consistent income.
What have been some of the top challenges for you?
Maybe it’s not financial. Or maybe it’s not even about being a freelancing parent specifically, just overall?
Austin:
Well, I think the first thing that comes to mind with kids in particular will be familiar to any parent in your audience.
It is really hard for young kids to understand the difference between physical presence and availability. Just because you can see me does not mean I'm available.
And then the next thing that comes to mind is certainly unpredictable income. I know that when you're just taking care of yourself, it's really easy to tighten your belt, eat Ramen Noodles, and manage any deprivation or hardship as part of the adventure.
But that's just not true with kids. It's not fun to have no margin with kids. It's not fun to think, “Well, I really want our daughter to play basketball” or “I want our son to go to karate lessons” or all those little extras and not be able to have them. Those are the things that we want to be able to provide for our kids.
So anytime you see a dip in income and it affects your kids in tangible ways, that's not a great feeling.
We had a metric crap ton of debt and I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment around that for a long time. I didn’t know how I would be able to have the debt and still give my kids everything I wanted to give them.
The third thing that comes to mind is working too much. I never would've thought, or I never would've pegged myself as the workaholic type.
But the same ability to keep my head down and get my work done and keep my promises and have high integrity and be of high character is a sword that cuts both ways because I can keep my head down too much.
Before I realize it, it's like 7:15pm and I should have stopped working almost two and a half hours ago. Or maybe I do take off and spend some time with the kids, but then I work from 8:00pm to Midnight answering emails and just farting around online.
So I think very clear boundaries are harder when you're a freelancer period.
But then when you throw kids and their needs into the mix and the fact that they just need time with you and attention from you, that just adds another layer of complexity on top.
It's something that you just have to figure out through trial and error, honestly.
Chad:
Definitely. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. How old are your kids?
Austin:
Our oldest is eight. Our middle is six and our youngest is four.
Chad:
Okay. My oldest is five, and then I have a two year old, and I have one on the way in a couple months.. My five year old is just starting to get to the age where he kind of understands the economics of me having to work.
I love how you explained it: being physically present, but not available.
They take that personally sometimes and have a hard time understanding it at certain ages like, “Wait, am I not good enough for you? Your computer is more important than me?”
It’s hard trying to explain to my son and teach him about how I’m sitting here on the computer and providing a service to people to get money.
I try to share with him how I use that money to pay for where we live and to pay for things like his toys that cost money.
So he's starting to kind of understand that I’m not just trying to ignore him. I think in my early days I also messed up, because I would be more reactive. When my son would interrupt me continually, my wife could only do so much to keep him from making noise or barging in. And so my reactions to that probably made it even worse.
Eventually I just opened up a space in my office where he could come and do his own thing if I'm not in a meeting. That kind of helped. But yeah, it's definitely a struggle especially when your kids are young.
Do you have some tips for someone who is a dad who is currently working a full-time job about where to start?
You and I have both been doing this for a while and we’ve had very short stints of normal employment. But there's a lot of dads that would love to have this type of work situation. And I'm sure their wives would love it as well to have the dad home and have a little more help from him.
Where do they start? Does it start with something related to figuring out what they can do or how they can convert their current skills? I've talked to a lot of dads who are employees and it can be hard for them to know how to convert their experiences into something that a freelancer could do.
What are some tips for how to get started?
There’s pressure to support your family and you can’t afford to just not have income for months on end, so how do you handle that?
Austin:
So a number of things come to mind. For one thing, I would recommend that anybody who is thinking about freelancing to pick up Sean McCabe's book “Overlap.” I think he gives some really good advice in that book.
One of the things that he points out is, especially when you're responsible for other people, that this idea that you need to pursue your passion and go all in on your passion is ridiculous.
You can't do that. It would be irresponsible and selfish for you to just quit unless you already have a year or two of runway saved up.
So what does a more incremental or a staggered approach look like? I think he offers a lot of helpful advice to figure that out.
The second thing that comes to mind is structure.
I think a lot of freelancers, especially right after they go full time, underestimate, or they realize that they underestimated how dependent they were upon external structure.
You can think about it like a house that has scaffolding around it. A full-time job is like scaffolding. It forces the structure.
So a lot of your habits and a lot of your big bursts of productivity are actually dependent on the fact that someone else is going to be watching. Knowing that, you don't take two hours at lunch, you only take 30 minutes or whatever.
There are other people who expect you to show up at a certain time and maybe even to stop working at a certain time.
Generating your own structure internally and developing the discipline that you need, the boundaries that you need, the work hours that you need, and the nonnegotiables that you need, is really important because we all need that structure.
And if you don't have structure before you start freelancing full time, or if you don't know where it's going to come from, then it's going to be really, really hard at first.
It's going to be stressful and you'll have anxiety because you've got these people depending on you, and you’re struggling to get traction in the morning and don’t want to get started until 10am.
That's when all that negative self talk kicks in.
But a lot of that can be preempted or counteracted from the get go if you make decisions ahead of time about the structure of your work day.
Making as many of those decisions in advance as you can I think will give you a smoother transition into freelancing.
The final thing that comes to mind is something that we already danced around and that is communication with your family.
“Hey, work is gonna look different now that I'm freelancing, but yet I still have to keep some business hours. I have to be unavailable to you for some hours so that I can actually generate income and support our family.”
It’s important to come up with the right language and discuss it with them so you’re all on the same page.
I'll give you an example: Early on when I was working way too much, my wife and I developed a question that she would ask me about my work:
“Are you doing what you want to be doing?”
I had a lot of anxiety then, and that anxiety was driving this hyper productivity.
I'd be working until late in the night. I think I told myself that I had to, but that question was a way for me to check in.
It gave me a little bit of outside perspective and helped me realize that if I still have my computer screen open at 10:00 PM, I'm probably not going to sleep well.
So knowing how you're going to communicate with your partner, knowing how you're going to communicate with your kids, and setting clear expectations all around, I think means there will be fewer hurt feelings.
Chad:
I absolutely agree. I think a lot of freelancers either underestimate the importance of that or they don't realize just how significant it is when you are raising a family.
For me in my first couple of years freelancing, I was just trying to work whenever I found time. Even though I like organization and structure, I didn’t have set office hours and boundaries around my down time.
It really took my wife calling me out and saying, “Hey, where are you?” for things to change.
Because I wouldn't be working, I'd be on my phone checking email or my brain would be cycling through stuff at work, trying to figure out.
I was just always working, even if I wasn't on the computer, my head was still at work. Once I created normal business hours, things got so much better.
I was able to tell my family what hours I was working, and plan things ahead of time and move my schedule if I needed to. But I had my default schedule, and that routine helped my young children to subconsciously understand when I’m working and when I’m able to have time with them.
It's really interesting how it's almost like they start to try to demand my attention more once I'm right at the end of when I'm supposed to be working. Or if I'm like 20, 30 minutes over the time that I usually plan to end work, they know it even though they can't tell time. So it makes a big difference. So I'm glad you shared that.
Do you have any other additional advice for new freelancing parents?
In my situation, I'm the only one that works. My wife does not work. So it's all on me to produce the income and to provide for my family. There's a different kind of pressure involved when only one parent is working.
Having my wife’s job be full time parenting is something we always wanted to do. We believe in the idea that while our kids are young, one parent should always be available for them.
What advice do you have for a dad who's in a similar situation or has a similar desire to provide for his family off one income? Any last thoughts on that?
Austin:
I mean it's such a personal thing, right?
My friend Carl Smith said he had with his wife where he was thinking about quitting his job at an agency and starting his own thing and his wife encouraged him to go for it.
She said, “Our kids won't know we’re poor for five years anyway because they’re too young.”
And I think for dads thinking about freelancing, dads who really want their families to be able to live off one income, I think you have to check your ego and take a step back and ask, “what do my partner and my kids really want?”
Maybe I should just speak for myself: I've always been ambitious. I've always wanted to make a lot of money.
I might be interested in pursuing income at that level, but the rest of my family would actually be satisfied with income at this level and would just love for me to be around more. True wealth to them would be dad not being constantly stressed about business and preoccupied with business.
So I would say to those dads looking at a single income, ”how much is enough and what does your family really want?”
Just know what is a true need, and what is your ambition or your ego or you wanting to be able to say that you made a certain number each year.
If that number is a vanity metric because you weren't even around your family that much, then yes, maybe you knocked it out of the park with your freelance earnings, but when's the last time you went out on a date? When was the last time you truly unplugged?
I'm not trying to beat anybody up here, because this is something I’ve struggled with as well. I've had a number of situations where I had to take a step back and ask myself if I’m really investing my time in what's most important?
Most of the time, the pursuit of money is not the most important thing.
So know what your number is and then know what true success looks like too. I know that I might sound like a grumpy old man, but that's the best answer I can give right now.
Chad:
That's absolutely perfect. That's a great way to end this conversation.
I’ve always been really ambitious too. But at one point, when I had my first kid, I realized that I needed to put a break on my career ambitions and just earn enough to make us comfortable.
I still have the expectation that it can keep growing, but now I value being steady and pacing myself in my work because I understand that true wealth is the time that you get with your family.
Your kids grow up too fast, and I want to be around to enjoy as much as I can.
I'm really glad that you shared that. I like talking to other fathers and parents who have learned that and realize that. So I'm glad that you're able to share that same message with other freelancing parents and especially dads who sometimes get really ambitious but not about what really matters most.
So thank you Austin, for sharing what you've shared with us today. Where can this audience go to learn more from you?
You do coaching for freelancers and brand consulting also, so where do you want to send this audience to? How can they learn more from you?
Connect with Austin:
Help For Freelancers: https://freelancecake.com/
People who want a brand that people will love: Balernum.com
Listen: